Re: AuthConfReq: Presentational Markup

Maciej Stachowiak, Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:43:28 -0700:
> On Mar 27, 2010, at 5:17 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

>>  http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/30/irony
   ...
>>  <strike>the</strike>
   ...
>> The latter does not conform to the author conformance requirements 
>> present in the document.  How is this less accessible than the 
>> alternative?

If we ask that was meant as real editorial mark-up, then <del> could 
have been better. Why not in combination with <strike>:

<strike><del>the</del></strike>

>>  How does it increase maintenance costs?  How does it 
>> increase document sizes?
> 
> It should be noted that the rationale for author conformance 
> requirements explicitly calls out the style attribute as a piece of 
> presentational markup that is allowed notwithstanding the general 
> reasons for the ban:
> 
> <http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#presentational-markup>
> 
> "The only remaining presentational markup features in HTML are the 
> style attribute and the style element.

In the e-mail message from Ian that Anne pointed to, Ian spoke about 
*media* specific presentational elements/features. Can't see that 
<style> meets that criteria - it is not "presentational".

  [...]
> So you could argue that this exception is not well justified (and 
> style should be banned too), or that the rationale for any 
> presentational markup to be banned is not well justified, or that the 
> style attribute and stye element are the wrong place to draw the 
> line.

A test of <del> against <strike> against <span 
style=text-decoration:line-through> in some terminal based web browsers 
that I installed via BSD ports:

    UA: Rendering
    
Results for <strike>:
---
  Lynx: [DEL: foo :DEL]   {same as for <strike>}
   W3m: [S: foo :S]
elinks: _foo_             {underlined text}
 links: foo               {colored text}
netrik: [- foo-]
retawq: [[foo]]

Results for <del>:
---
  Lynx: [DEL: foo :DEL]
   W3m: [DEL: foo :DEL]
elinks: foo               {no styling at all}
 links: foo               {no styling at all}
netrik: [- foo-]
retawq: [[foo]]

Results of <span style=text-decoration:line-through>:
---
  Lynx: text               {no styling at all}
   W3m: text               {no styling at all}
elinks: text               {no styling at all}
 links: text               {no styling at all}
netrik: text               {no styling at all} 
retawq: text               {no styling at all} 

Also tested Lobo, where <del> does NOT create a line-through (however 
Lobo has some CSS support). 

Summary: Span does not render as anything. <del> has a particular 
rendering in W3m, Lynx, netrik and retawq. The latter 3 render <strike> 
and <del> the same way. The styled <span> had no effect in the text 
browsers. The eLinks browser, the Links browser and Lobo only "make a 
difference" for <strike> - they don't render <del> in a particular way.

Conclusion: 

1) <strike> has a little bit wider support than <del> in these low 
resource browsers.

2) <strike> need not be media specific.

  [... snipped Maciej's biblical references ...]

Exiting analogies ... ;-) 

> Banning <font> in general, rather than, say, only when used in a way 
> that actually harms accessibility, is analogous to this reasoning. By 
> having the blanket ban, we avoid the presumed negative externality, 
> without having to closely inquire about the particular circumstances 
> of each use. The latter requires too much judgment for a conformance 
> checker.

I think that the ban on some of the presentational elements have raised 
the awareness of the need to make pages accessible across media. 
However, I believe we do not need this simplistic ban anymore.

[...]
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 27 March 2010 23:07:57 UTC